A Jewish Pioneer in Lithography: The Career and Art of a Freemason Rabbi from the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Lithography, the revolutionary printing technology invented in Bavaria at the end of the eighteenth century soon came to almost completely replace wood and metal engraving and by the second half of the nineteenth century, it turned the printing craft into printing industry on both sides of the Atlantic. With the advent of emancipation, a wide range of employments and occupations opened up for Jews, including handicrafts, artisanry, and arts in general. Not many biographies of Jewish artists are known from the first half of the nineteenth century, and even less from the field of lithography.

The talk will present a Jewish pioneer in lithography, who was born in Hungary at the end of the eighteenth century, learned the craft in German lands in the 1820s, continued working in Brussels, and finally settled in the Paris of the July Monarchy (1830–1848), where he produced the bulk of his artworks. The career and artistry of Rabbi David Rosenberg, the artist-lithographer, are extraordinary on various accounts. Rosenberg gained employment in the Royal Library and worked in the Department of Prints, Geographic Maps and Plans where he was busy with the reduction of maps and calligraphic works. Archival documents shed light on his socio-economic standing as well. The rabbi was also intent on opening his own lithographic workshop, but no licence was issued by the authorities, which compelled him to work with other lithographers—among them some of the leading names of the new technology, including a woman: Engelmann, Kaeppelin, Durier, and Formentin. With the help of stylistic and iconographic analyses, the talk will also reveal the indebtedness of the rabbi’s Kabbalistic-Masonic art to a salient object of Jewish folklore: the Mizrach table. A close examination will show how distinctly Jewish features both in style and content were transplanted into the new medium.